Paradoxically Transcendent
by OmegaSonic0
Summary: To err is human. To err while piloting a time machine is time lord. When the Doctor is asked a challenging question, he is determined to answer it, learning the answer at the same time. Though he'll learn the hard way some questions are best unanswered.


Paradoxically Transcendent: A Fourth Doctor Story

On the far outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy, the Tardis hurtled through the emptiness, spinning on its own axis, the light on its top flashing rhythmically. In the secondary control room, the Doctor stood before the viewing screen next to Leela, lecturing her on the laws of gravity.

"And that, dear Leela, is how a planet can orbit a star without falling in and burning up!" exclaimed the Doctor, beaming at her. "Do you have any questions?"

Leela looked a bit confused, but had her thoughts together. "Well, yes. But it really has nothing to do with gravity."

The Doctor looked at her, curious about what she was thinking. "Well, go ahead and ask. Knowledge is a formidable weapon."

"Well, it's about your explanation about how the inside of the Tardis can fit, well… Inside the Tardis. You said that it needs to be both here, and there. If here is inside the blue box, where is there?" She looked at him, head slightly tilted, awaiting his response.

The Doctor's face broke into a wide grin, as he began to explain. "Well, you see, the interior is indeed both here and there, and the there is…" The Doctor trailed off in mid-sentence, thinking about what he was to answer. "You know, Leela, I don't quite know. I don't recall ever learning where exactly the interior of a Tardis is kept. I must have skipped that day at the Academy."

"So then we'll never know?" Leela looked forlorn at the thought of an unanswered question.

The Doctor smiled, and walking to the control panel said, "Now who said anything about that?" He pulled back the small door covering an unmarked keyboard. Flipping one switch, he closed the cover over the view screen, before starting to push many of the other buttons.

"Doctor, where are we going? To your home world?"

"Heavens no!" he exclaimed. "Humans aren't allowed on Gallifrey anyway. No, what I'm doing is setting a beacon. One we can track to find out where the inside of the Tardis really is."

"Where will you put the beacon then? If it's inside, or outside, what good will that do? We could just walk there… I don't see how this will help!"

The Doctor looked at her for a moment, before returning his gaze to the buttons before him. "Why Leela, you're absolutely correct! And that is why I'm placing the beacon between the interior and exterior of the Tardis! Put it there, follow it, and viola, we have our answer!"

Leela's face lit up upon hearing they would get their answer. "Oh, Doctor, that's brilliant!"

"Well of course it is. I'm the one who thought of it, after all." With one last grin, he pushed the last button, and set the Tardis in flight. The sound of the engines filled the room, and a small shaking confirmed what their ears told them.

"Oh, I cannot wait to see what strange wor-," Leela's sentence was cut short as the normal bumps and jitters of the Tardis' flight suddenly became much more manic, with the whole capsule flipping end over end. The coat stand in the corner fell, the covers of the remaining panels of the console flipped open and banged shut. The Doctor and Leela both were thrown to the ground, which was the wall, the ceiling, the proper floor, and each repeating, until the Tardis landed with a resounding thud.

Once the shaking had quit, Leela grabbed the center console and dragged herself to her feet. "Five in ten times my animal skins! Every time you take me somewhere, we either don't get there, land someplace far away, or wind up in trouble before we get outside!"

The Doctor stood up and straightened his scarf, before walking into the corner and standing the coat stand back up. "Now now, Leela, I assure you we've arrived where we meant. The, erm, rough flight could only be caused by the Tardis passing through its own transduction barriers." He moved to the center console, and began picking up the few objects that had fallen from their cupboards, and replaced them. He opened up the cover to the scanner, and turned on the external camera.

Leela watched the screen for some twenty seconds before turning to the Doctor. "Oh, some great joke. Tell me we'll find out, then show me the inside of the Tardis. I should go back to the Sever Teem."

The Doctor couldn't keep the exasperation from his face. "Leela, why would I do such a thing! I'm as baffled as you as to why the camera shows inside my ship! Now here, have a jelly baby, and calm down until I figure out what happened." He fished the little paper sack from his pocket, and placed it onto the console top.

"Doctor, you can stay in here, fiddle with your machine, and eat your candy. I'm going out there." She strode to the door leading to the exterior doors, drew her knife, and grasped the handle.

"Oh, very well very well…. I'll be with you in a moment," he said, paying her no mind, until she opened the door, and he heard not just that door open, but the one behind him as well.

Leela yanked the door open, and strode through, seeing what she least expected. The secondary control room. The one she had just left, minus the Doctor at the console. As she stepped into the room, she absently pushed the door shut behind her, and walked to the console. She noted it was covered in a thick layer of dust. "Oh, very funny Doctor! I'm sick of your joking!"

When the Doctor heard the door open behind him, as well as off to his side, he looked to see Leela walking into the hall, and a black rectangle in the frame of the door behind him. "Odd…. That door leads to some of the bedrooms… So why can't I see the hall way…?" He walked to the side door, pulled it open, and stuck his head through to call for Leela. "Leela, don't go too far…" Noticing where he had just put his head, he stepped through the door and up to Leela. "How did you manage that?"

"Manage what? This was your doing, not mine!"

"Oh, that's impossible! I couldn't have had time to move the rooms in the Tardis around like this! And look at all this dust! It looks as though no one has been in this room for a few centuries… When we just left it…"

"Well, if you didn't do it, and I certainly didn't do it, then how did it happen?"

The Doctor was still amused with her intellect. "There you go again, Leela, asking all the right questions. Come, let's try to reach the main console, maybe then we'll get some answers." He strode to the same door they both previously left the room from, pulled it open, and stepped through.

His amusement faded quickly, however, seeing as he had just entered the same room again, from the rear door, like last time. As Leela joined him, however, he noted that the room wasn't just dusty this time. It was older. Damaged. Several of the stained glass roundels were cracked, two were shattered outright. The console's paneling was warped and eroded. Neither of them could have done all that.

"Doctor… It looks as though we're walking through the history of this room…"

"Yes… But you rather mean it's future… I wonder what could have cause all of this damage… Perhaps going forward again will give us a clue. Or get us out of here." He strode to the side door, pulled it open, and was greeted by a wall of water rushing through the doorway.

Leela reacted instantly to the sound of rushing water, running through the flooding room, and helping the Doctor to push the door shut. "Doctor, what on earth just happened? Where did all of that water come from?"

"Oh, I daresay it came from the one of the pools you enjoy swimming in so much, Leela. The Tardis interior must reconfigure itself sometime far in the future… We'll have to go back and hope we can find a different way out of the control room." He removed his coat and began trying to shake the water out, following suit with his scarf. "Let's see… This was the third version of this room we entered since leaving our own… So back to ours we go." As he pulled the room's back door open, he noted that it wasn't just black beyond the frame, like he had seen in the first room. He strode through the door, leaving it open for Leela, and repeated this until back in the original room.

Leela quickly followed him, closing all the doors behind her, until she rejoined the Doctor in the first room. As she shut the door behind her, the room's rear door stayed open, still leading to darkness. "So… Our answers are beyond that door?"

"Well, it certainly looks that way. But honestly, there's no telling what lies through that door. It could be anything. A black hole, a starless night, the inside of some massive organism… Only one way to find out." He hung his still dripping coat and scarf on the coat stand in the corner, checked his pocket for his sonic screwdriver, and stepped through the doorway, through the blackness.

Leela stood back, staring at where the Doctor had disappeared. She couldn't hear anything from the other side, least of all anything the Doctor might have said. So, knowing what she must do, she readied her knife, and patted the little bag she carried her Janis thorn in, and stepped through the doorway. The door slowly swung shut, and clicked closed behind her.

The Doctor stood in a hallway, much like any other in the Tardis, but darker, dimmer, and the sound of the engines hummed deeply around him, telling him he was close to the service areas, very deep inside the Tardis. In an area he rarely ventured. When he materialized in the corridor, he looked behind him for the doorway, and didn't see it, not that he expected to find it. It was with no surprise that he watched Leela materialize in front of him, knife in hand. "I wish you would get rid of that thing. Sooner or later you'll hurt yourself with it."

Leela put her knife away at the sound of the Doctor's voice, and whirled around to face him. "Doctor, you're okay! I couldn't hear a thing through that door!"

"Yes… I would assume not. It seems that it was a wormhole within the Tardis, bringing us here." He continued to glance around, looking at the doors placed every so often along the walls.

"So, where are we then? You've never shown me this part of the Tardis before. It's very noisy down here," she said as she looked all around the hall, looking for any signs of danger. She slowly put her knife away when she couldn't see any threat.

"Well, if the noise, and my own intuition is right, we're somewhere near the engines… And the main housing for other vital systems as well. Come on, let's have a look around!" He bounded to the nearest door, which looked to be hollow glass filled with smoke. Leela moved behind him, peering over his shoulder. "Now, beyond this door is a mystery… To both you and I! Exciting, isn't it?" He couldn't help but break into his wide grin.

"Every time you say something is exciting, we get attacked, or caught in a trap, or nearly die in some other way. I wish you'd stop it."

"Nonsense! Where's all the fun in a safe adventure?" He placed his hand on the knob, grinning his widest, turned it, and eased the door open. Smoke poured out of the door on the floor, flooding around their ankles before continuing down the hall a bit and dissipating into invisible vapor. The Doctor swung the door open completely, then stepped through, into the unknown. As he stepped in, the room's lights turned on, giving a glimpse of a room the size of his boot cupboard, but this was impossible to tell for either of the adventurers, due to the foggy smoke.

Leela readied her knife once more, and stepped through behind him. She was being very careful to step right behind him. She continually scanned the room, but to no avail. She did, however notice something floating at about eye level a few feet away from her. "Doctor? I think I see something. It's just… Floating there."

The Doctor was eager to find anything in this room, and whirled to face the same direction as Leela. "What? That? Well, let's see what it is!" He quickly stepped so the object was right in front of his nose, and stared at it, hardly daring to believe it.

Leela stood on his left, looking at the object as well. "Oh, what is it? It looks like some sort of weapon, but nothing I've ever seen with the Sevateem."

"Well of course not! It is a weapon. Sometimes. On occasion. It's my sonic screwdriver. But what is it doing in here? I know I put it into my pocket last I used it!" So saying, he reached into his pocket, and grabbed the very object he was staring at. As he pulled it from his pocket, the screwdriver in front of him rocketed upwards, and out of sight in the smoke. His eyes grew wide and bulged from their sockets. He pushed his screwdriver back down into his pocket, and the one that was already in the room floated down, back to it's original position.

"Doctor, what does that mean? Is it a trap? Has someone stolen your belongings?"

"No, Leela, of course not! But now I know exactly where we are! We're in my pocket!" So saying, he pulled his bag of jelly babies from his coat, took one from the bag, and threw it straight up with all his might, watching it disappear, only to reappear, flying up and out of his coat pocket, before coming to rest beside the screwdriver, at about eye level.

"So, we're in your pocket, in the Tardis? I don't understand, Doctor." She walked about, mindful not to disturb any of the objects floating around.

"Well, it's simple. Like the Tardis, my pockets are bigger inside than out. And it appears that this room is the inside. Although… The wormhole we passed through earlier must have breached time as well… Likely the start of a gravity bubble. Though I wonder, can a Tardis make a gravity bubble if it's inside itself, or does that only happen with two separate Tardises?" He continued off on this tangent, thinking aloud as always, watching some of the objects floating around.

As he stopped to examine a small wallet and silver pen with a blue cap, a giant hand, by his perspective, show down from above and grabbed the wallet. The Doctor leaped back, stumbling into Leela, who drew her knife, perceiving the hand as a threat. "Calm down, Leela…. Those are likely just the belongings of the present me… So long as we stay clear, we're safe."

They continued to back away from the place the hand had appeared, now standing near a recorder. The Doctor stopped to look at it once more. "Ah… Yes, my recorder. My second incarnation was fond of it. Someday I shall have to tell you about how it saved the universe and imploded the anti-matter universe. It was an unique experience, one in which I discovered myself…"

As he stood and recalled years gone past, the hand of the recorder's owner dived from the ceiling and snatched it up, pulling it back up into the fog. The Doctor stood and stared, eyes even wider in disbelief, locked onto the empty air. He glanced around and saw a few more hands reach down for a few more objects, each hand giving a short glimpse of the clothing of it's owner.

"Leela…. I think it would be a VERY good idea to make our way back out into the hall…" He started slowly stepping towards the door, giving any object a wide berth, Leela right behind him. The door was in sight, only ten feet away, when a handkerchief floated in front of it, causing both of them to freeze. "Oh no…"

"Doctor? What is it? Some kind of hostile alien?" As always, Leela was armed when facing anything she thought might be hostile.

"Oh, if only it were that simple. I recognize that… It's my old handkerchief… From my first incarnation, and I used it quite often." Simply saying so proved his point, the old man's hand dipped in, taking the cloth and returning it within a minute. "It won't be easy getting past… Being dragged out would cause a nightmare of a paradox."

"Then we simply wait for him to take it again, and as soon as it is returned, we run for the door." She sheathed her knife, and tensed up, watching the air above the item. Once more, the hand dipped, grabbed and pulled it out. Once more it returned, released the overused rag, and disappeared.

The two broke into a run, skirting the handkerchief as best as possible, and diving through the door. The Doctor and Leela tumbled back into the hall, panting, and slumped to the floor, laughing at the narrow escape. "I don't think I've ever worried so much about you getting hold of me, Doctor."

"Well, it would have been interesting, to say the least. I'd rather it stay unknown." He hopped to his feet, pulled his coat tight around his shoulders, and adjusted his scarf. He pulled Leela to her feet, grinning. "Well then, shall we see what else is in store for us?" He strode off around the corner, coat and scarf whipping around behind him.

She watched down the hall, opposite the way the Doctor went, wary as ever. She thought to herself, I don't see why we must keep exploring the Tardis. I wish we could just leave wherever we are. It all feels wrong… She then decided to turn and follow after him, finding him looking up and down another door, one that appeared to be covered in little trinkets, all appearing to be old and tattered, except for a bow tie, which was the eleventh in the line of objects. "Well, what's in that one?"

"I haven't a clue. Could be anything. Could be the Heart of the Tardis. Could be spare parts." He grabbed the handle, and shoved the door open, striding in.

Leela followed him in, glancing about the wide room, her eyes resting on the 14 pedestals. 13 of them had outfits on them, one of which she recognized as the one the Doctor was wearing. The other two just had mannequins on them, nude and blank. She walked up beside the Doctor and asked him about the room.

"Well, it appears to be a showcase of my looks. See, these first three are what I used to wear, in my previous incarnations." He pointed at the respective outfits before moving to the copy of his current one. "And this is me now. Or a copy of my clothes, anyway. I don't remember bringing any outfit down here yet." He moved one pedestal down the line, observing a red version of his coat and scarf. "This must be in my current incarnation. It's made for my size."

"Doctor, what do you mean your incarnations? I don't understand," she said, as she looked over a blue suit wrapped in a brown trench coat.

"Well, Leela, you see, when I die, I don't really die, I just change my face, and my personality a bit. Then I decide I don't like the clothes I was wearing, and change them. So, each major change is a different incarnation," he said, moving in front of a brightly colored patchwork coat. "Thought it seems none of me has good fashion sense… This blue copy is an improvement though."

"Doctor, I really don't think this is the time for examining such things. You did say we needed to hurry."

"Oh, yes, alright. Let's get going then." He turned on his heel, and walked through the door. By

the time Leela managed to follow him, he was already turning the corner. He seemed oblivious to a major change however, the walls having changed from their grey color, now looking like a thin sheet of copper.

She rushed around the corner after him, grabbing the back of his coat and pulling him to a stop. "Doctor! Doctor stop! Don't you see this? What's happening?"

The sudden halt brought the Doctor out of his own thoughts. He looked around, examining the change in wall color and texture. "We've jumped the Tardis' time track again. Its in the future, though how far I can't say. My 11th incarnation, at a guess, by the number of costume we saw in the last room."

From deep within the Tardis, a great gonging began to echo through the halls. Leela jumped against the wall, knife in her hand once more, eyes constantly shifting between left and right, ready for an attacker. "Doctor! What is that noise?"

The Doctor was frozen in place. His gaze burning a hole in the wall at the end of the hall. "It's a signal. A call to arms. It means disaster. That the universe or the Tardis is in great danger. Come on!" He took off running, clearing the hall, and rounding the corner, scarf swinging about behind him.

They ran through what seemed to be endless halls, at least from Leela's perspective. Lefts, rights, up stairs, down stairs. Through great cavernous rooms, and odd doorways. It seemed they went through the same room and hall at least seven times, but she had no choice but to trust the Doctor's sense of direction. The worst parts of it all though, were when time itself seemed to stretch out, and her movements felt sluggish.

Eventually they reached the end of the halls, and stepped onto the highest landing in the Tardis' current console room. The Doctor had stopped at the top of the short flight of stairs, since the hall was above the console platform. Leela nearly ran right into him, and he wavered at the top of the stairs for a second, before regaining his balance and dashing down them. He ran around the console, hands lightly running over all the controls, his eyes locked on the glass column in the center, the time column, and in its center, the time rotor.

He turned his attention to the controls themselves, eyes wide in shock, mouth slightly agape. The console in front of him was a far cry from what he was used to. Instead of the stock buttons, switches, and levers, he saw a menagerie of common household items, artfully integrated into the machine, seamlessly replacing the standard Galifreyan parts. "My word… What have you been through…?" he muttered, moving to a different panel, and activating the scanner.

"Doctor? Is this really the Tardis?" Leela questioned, standing down beside the doors. Instead of the large, heavy white doors, with jagged sides and roundels, she ran her hand down a thin piece of wood, almost exactly what you would expect to see from inside of a real police box.

As the giant round screen came to life beside her, the Doctor solemnly replied. "Oh, yes, I do believe so. Sometime quite far in her own future…. At least 600 years… Maybe 800. And this isn't just a change of theme… Almost like a… Regeneration of its own…" He turned his eyes to the scanner screen, and was appalled at what he saw. Another Tardis console room. The specifics wavered, due to the effects produced by nesting TT capsules. But the view did show the small scanner screen of this second Tardis. It looked like a repeated image, but slightly…. Darker, perhaps.

The decision was immediate. "Leela, stay right by the doors. As soon as I open them, we need to run out! I've found the fast return switch on this console. It seems a later incarnation of myself put it back in, luckily. Once I hit this button, we'll have mere seconds to escape. Now, let me find the door control."

Leela was a rare step ahead of the Doctor on this matter. She had already turned the tiny knob on the door's latch, and pulled it in, opening the door to the next console room. "Come on, Doctor! You said yourself, we've no time to linger!" Not waiting for him, she rushed through, stepping onto a gently sloping ramp, made of steel, full of small holes. At first she was a bit thrown by it, but she quickly turned around, and saw the outside of the Tardis she just exited.

Just then, the Doctor pressed the switch, and practically flew out the doors, pulling them shut behind him. It was just enough time for her to glimpse the glass bauble begin to pulse up and down in its glass tube. The air was filled with a very loud thud, as the Tardis' brakes disengaged. This was followed by a great grinding and heaving sound, accompanied by the Tardis vanishing into thin air. The sounds that came after floated through her mind, the image of the brand new looking blue box fading soon after. The last detail she recalled was the round emblem on the door.

As she turned back to the Doctor, she noticed the green glowing column in the center of the domed room. The light from the hexagonal indents in the walls met the green somewhere around the center platform's railing, mingling casually. Before she could examine the room any further, the Doctor started shouting once more.

He hadn't looked at the coral pillars, or the metal grate floor. He ignored the out of place three person yellow chair. The only thing he was looking at or paying any attention to was the console itself. That and it's lack of official parts, much like the last console. "Oh dear oh dear…. This Tardis is in even worse shape than the last…" He moved about, running his hands over the mis-matched parts. He took his scarf off, and looped it around a lever on the mechanical panel. He tossed the end out onto the ramp, and started prepping the Tardis for flight. Once he had finished, he walked over to the end of his scarf, and looked back at the console. "Poor old thing… She'll manage though. Right, Leela, get to that door."

Once more, however, Leela was ahead of him, through the door and into the next version of the Tardis. The Doctor saw her through the door, and gave a swift yank on his scarf, which he had tied to the hand brake. The knot on the handle slid right off the top once the brake was disengaged, and he dashed out the door. He stopped and sighed in relief, tugging on his scarf so he could gather it to put it back on. It was stuck. It had caught in the door of the Tardis he was attempting to set in motion. He tried tugging at it more, but it wouldn't budge. The blue box began to disappear from this area of reality, and not even the Doctor could predict what would happen if it was allowed to leave with his scarf stuck in the door.

Leela came to his rescue again, drawing her knife and quickly cutting clean through the Doctor's scarf near the end. The Doctor pulled up the remains of his scarf, and examined the hacked off end. No more than a foot of the lengthy knitting was gone, but it was a loss all the same. "Oh, my scarf… I suppose I'll have to go see Madam Nostradamus about getting it fixed… Later, of course…"

With that minor crisis averted, the Doctor moved on to examine the area of this version of the Tardis. Along the various oddly numbered walls he saw shelves of books, on a rug off to the side of a console was a large reading chair with a foot stool and a light. Off through a crooked path of books a small stand could be seen with some melted candles and various nick-nacks stacked up on it. In the center of all of this sat a Gallifreyan ash chest, broken in half. A record player sat near the chair, unwound.

Leela was currently examining the console. It was surrounded by six pillars that looked like steel supports. A very dated monitor hung on a criss-crossing, stretching pull down hanger. The display currently read the planet was Earthifrey, in the Rassimanian Era. If Leela actually knew what either of this figures meant, she would know that the display was glitched, due to the Tardis itself being confused as to it's timespace location. The controls for the year, a set of four spinning dials numbered zero through 9 rapidly spun both forward in back alternatively.

The Doctor step up to the console and smacked the panel with the dials, getting them stuck. He dashed around to the other side of the console, tapping a few more of the controls, and programming the Tardis to return to its previous destination. He pushed Leela out through the giant gothic doors and shut the blue police box doors behind him. The vessel slowly faded from inside the next.

This Tardis was set to the standard desktop. The console version the Doctor was most familiar with. Or close to it, anyway. One upgrade or so, but close enough. The Doctor and Leela set that Tardis in motion as well. They repeated this procedure with the next two Tardises as well, passing up a rainbow colored umbrella and a stalk of celery, before stepping back into the Tardis they had arrived in.

Leela noticed the yo-yo and cubes sitting on the floor and realized the same. "So, Doctor, we can finally leave, right? We've made it back!" She stood by the console, smiling at him.

"I'm afraid not, Leela. While we've made it back into the Tardis we've arrived in, there's no telling if there are more Tardises outside this one." He steps up to the console, and activates the scanner, revealing the worst. Their Tardis is inside of another. "Now this is the real problem… If I'm right, there are still four Tardises stacked. Ours, and three more stacked around us. But setting those ones in motion will simply take the one inside with it…"

"Couldn't we… Move our Tardis into the one on the outside, then simply do what we've been doing? Setting them off and running out?"

The Doctor thought this over, wondering if it was possible to do. "It could be done, yes, but it's much too dangerous to do. It could make things ten times worse. Or we could completely overshoot the first Tardis, and wind up someplace different, with no clue how to get back. No, I think our best chance is to set the other three on a timer, or to just release the holding mechanism on them, and let them drift off on their own."

Leela looked a bit puzzled, but opened the door for them to get the crisis resolved quickly anyway. "What exactly is the 'holding mechanism,' Doctor?" She stepped through the doors into another Tardis, looking much like the one they had just come from, yet everything looked much newer, albeit not as advanced as the Tardis just left.

The Doctor walked through after her, looking around a bit. "The holding mechanism… It holds the Tardis in it's current time and space location, much like a care is held in place by its brakes. Set it loose, and the Tardis will soon venture off on it's own, winding up somewhere and when else. Very likely to wherever it was drawn from before coming here." He stepped to the console, and opened the door, and went out, not wasting anymore time.

Leela followed him into yet another Tardis, hoping for an end to this repeating madness. She stood and looked around this new console room. It appeared to be much larger than previous rooms, though much of the space was empty. Looking at the console itself, she noticed that it had many more controls on it than she was used to seeing. The standard triangular light pattern inside the time rotor was replaced by a bellows like device with a whirling dual paddled top inside the column. Having no clue which control would open the door, she simply stood beside it until the Doctor opened it, and went through.

Inside this next Tardis, which also happened to be the last, all the empty space seen in the last room was filled. Large computer banks covered in rapidly blinking red lights stood against the walls. The Doctor walked past them all, looking at the various numberings and markings on the panels. Leela noticed one thing had stopped. "Doctor, that ringing has gone… I think it was gone from the last two Tardises as well."

The Doctor walked to the console, and began looking for the release for the holding mechanism. "That's because these Tardises haven't been set to use the cloister bell yet, they rely on other warning systems built into the console or console room. Aha!" He slid a knob across one of the panels of the console, and grabbed Leela's arm, dragging her back into the previous box, and shutting the door. "No telling where we really are, and I've a feeling it's best not to know, if it messes with the instruments so much…"

Leela looked a little disturbed at this thought, and shook herself. "Doctor, I think I'll go wait in our Tardis… You can handle this, right?"

The Doctor nodded, and fiddled with the controls as she walked into the next Tardis. He found the control and released the hold, running into the next Tardis and again shutting the door behind him. The sound of the cloister bell ringing incredibly loudly wafting through the open doors of his own Tardis. His curiosity was building, and the temptation to open the scanner and look out into whatever void they were in. He grabbed the slider for the holding mechanism, and turned to ready himself to run into his ship. But the scanner caught his eyes. "Well, I suppose one itsy peek couldn't hurt anything…" He let go of the slider, and turned the knob to open the cover over the scanner.

What was shown by that screen was something not even Time Lords see commonly. The screen showed static upon activation, and then showed what could only be described as the time vortex inside of a rainbow kaleidoscope. He closed the scanner, set the Tardis adrift, and walked back into his own ship, closing the door behind him. He walked to the console, and stared down at it.

Leela walked up behind him, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Doctor? Are you alright? You seem a bit scared… Doctor? Doctor?"

The Doctor jumped a bit, before starting to move around the console, adjusting various settings. "Say, Leela, how would you like to learn how humans lived before moving into the stars? Say, late nineteenth century, London? We'll go to the theater!"

Leela shook her head and stepped back from the console, sighing. "Doctor, I'm afraid I'll never understand you…"


End file.
